Lighttpd mod_rewrite

(updated )

Source

I've migrated my teeny-weenie Xen web/mail server to Debian/etch. It hasn't even been rebooted (it would be a shame to spoil the uptime :-) ):

$ uprecords
     #               Uptime | System                                     Boot up
----------------------------+---------------------------------------------------
->   1   198 days, 06:16:44 | Linux 2.6.16.13-xenU      Thu Oct 12 10:12:51 2006
     2    99 days, 19:25:00 | Linux 2.6.12-xenU         Sun Oct  9 03:58:58 2005

It runs Lighttpd, a small and fast little webserver, popular in the Rails world. Lighttpd with PHP-fastcgi is probably faster than apache, and uses much less RAM.

With etch, I've finally been able to get mod_rewrite to work. So my Zapiro archive has nice URLs now :-)

Lighttpd has a very nice configuration style:

    # No WWW
    $HTTP["host"] =~ "^www\.((.+\.)?rivera\.za\.net)$" {
      url.redirect = ( ".*" => "http://%1$1" )
    }
    # Add WWW:
    $HTTP["host"] =~ "^((foobar|someclient)\.co\.za)$" {
      url.redirect = ( ".*" => "http://www.%1$0" )
    }

    ############################################
    # PHP Apps:
    $HTTP["host"] =~ "^(zapiro\.rivera\.za\.net)$" {
      url.redirect = ( "^/\?/(.*)" => "http://%1/$1" )
      url.rewrite-once = ( "^/(feed)$" => "/index.php?/$1",
                           "^/([0-9]+/[0-9]+/[0-9]+)$" => "/index.php?/$1" )
    }

It's more logical than apache, but you have to watch out for rewrite->redirect->rewrite loops. So if you change to a clean URL syntax, you can't put in rewrites from index.php?/uglurl to /uglyurl because /uglyurl rewrites back to /index.php?/uglyurl, and you get a loop :-)